truth: (b) the mystery of the trinity the term of an act of thinking is a thought, something that remains within the being of the thinker; and it is this thought and not the act of thinking which we conceive as the Second Person. Can we say that love likewise produces a ‘‘term” within the lover? St. Thomas tells us that we can. Though love tends towards a being outside itself, yet the act of loving arouses a state of warmth in the soul by which the being that is loved is present to the affections. This state is not the act of loving, but is produced in the soul by the act of loving, is what we have called a “term” of the act. And so it is in the love with which God loves Himself — that is, with which the Father loves the Son and the Son the Father. The “term ” of that act of love (like the earlier term of the act of thinking) is subsistent, is a Person — the Third Person of the Blessed Trinity, the Holy Ghost. On this matter of the “procession”* of the Holy Ghost as breathed forth by God in an act of love, we cannot claim revelation. It is St. Augustine’s magnificent contribution to the theology of that which we do know by revelation — that the Holy * The act by which the Holy Ghost subsists is not “generation” — this we know by revelation, God the Son is “the only begotten of the Father.” The Holy Ghost, says the Athanasian Creed is “from the Father and the Son, neither made, nor created, nor begotten, but proceeding.” What is the difference between the generation of the Son and the “spiration” or breathing forth of the Holy Ghost? Many answers arc suggested. St. Thomas finds the difference in this: an act of the intellect has as its precise object the production of a term in the likeness of the thing conceived, and likeness is an essential of sonship: whereas though the Holy Ghost is in fact like in nature to the Father and Son, yet likeness is not the primary object of an act of the will. 87